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Comment by devoutsalsa | Hacker News Reader

After all the Bitcoin is mined, it will be the greenest crypto currency, yes?. What if we just accelerated the mining, or made them all available at once. Problem solved? Truth be told, I really don't know what I'm talking about. It just sounded good in my head.

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Nope. Bitcoin transactions require wasting energy. It is built into the very fabric of bitcoin. Currently, the energy wasters ("miners") are compensated by the minting of new bitcoins, and some transaction fees. As the number of bitcoins asymptomatically approaches it's maximum, the energy wasters are still compensated, but more and more through transaction fees.

Impossible due to how cryptocurrency works. In any cryptocurrency there is something called an "emissions target" which will only up to X amount of coins to be "released" on the discovery of a new block. This is also compounded by the fact that even if you did try to accelerate the mining by adding more powerful nodes into the network, the network would automatically adjust the difficulty in order to keep blocks spitting out at the predetermined time of 10 minutes per block.

Nice edit : >Truth be told, I really don't know what I'm talking about. It just sounded good in my head.

I sincerely wish more people had your ability for introspection!

Better solution would be to choose a proof of stake cryptocurrency instead

Even when all bitcoins are mined mining has to continue.

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